(1942).

Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 11:149-164

Pseudoimbecility: A Magic Cap of Invisibility

Margaret Mahler-Schoenberger
One of the magic objects owned by the Nibelungs of German mythology is a covering for the head which endows its possessor with the power of becoming invisible.Being invisible, the wearer can be present and act in situations from which otherwise he would be excluded. Young Siegfried, the hero of the Nibelung Saga, is the embodiment of juvenile strength and courage. With the help of his magic cap (Tarnkappe), he commits a series of deeds which amount to conspicuous sexual crimes. He woos Brunhild in place of King Gunther, and invisibly usurps the jus primae noctis with the Queen in the presence of his King. These exploits do not reduce Siegfried's radiant reputation as the popular symbol of the youthful national hero; on the contrary, the invisibility provided by the magic cap is one of the most important attributes in according him the privileges of a hero. It is well known that the essence of mythology, like the rituals and customs of primitive culture, reflect the inner psychic realities of childhood. Experience in psychoanalysis with children brought me to realize what is the symbolic psychological meaning of the 'magic cap' in childhood generally, and in cases of pseudoimbecility specifically. What I wish to describe is the function of stupidity as a magic cap (Tarnkappe), as a means of restoring or maintaining a secret libidinous rapport within the family. This, I believe, essential function of stupidity (not recorded to an adequate extent in the psychoanalytic literature) enables children as well as infantile adults to participate in the sexual life of parents and other adults to an amazingly unlimited extent which, overtly expressed, would be strictly and definitely forbidden.
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Between child and mother there exists from the beginning a close phylogenetic bond which is unique and much more exclusive than communication by words or thoughts; it is an interrelationship through the medium of affective expressions. We know how subtle is this communication between the infant and the mother who feeds it at the breast. It is clinically and statistically proved that difficulties in feeding, as well as the general health of the infant, are much more dependent on the emotional attitude of the mother towards the child than on her organic ability to supply milk or the degree of her conscious efforts to provide hygienic nursing. The interrelation between the unconscious of the mother and the reception of stimulation of the sense organs of the baby is the prototype for a way of communication between child and adult which is not confined within the limited sphere of language. The affective outbursts of the infant are the means by which it attains gratification of its instinctual needs, and the absence of such outbursts indicates an alarming degree of inertia (Ribble). The infant's bodily functions are in direct accordance with its instinctual drives; its reactions to surplus stimuli are outbursts of temper. By these affective outbursts the infant achieves domination in the motherchild relationship; left alone it would be completely helpless, abandoned to perish. Even after the differentiation of the ego and the beginning of speech, the expressive movements and affective expressions of the entire body are used by the child as much more congenial means of communication with the environment than language. The archaic common language of human beings is and remains the language of affect. Whenever the repressed complexes of childhood are evoked, we relapse again into this unconscious affective rapport. The domination of the mother by the infant gradually becomes reversed in the course of the second and third years. While the eighteen-month-old baby, on uttering a short cry of command, is brought with eager speed to the pot, the three-year-old is threatened with deprivation of
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love should it fail to comply with the requirements of the adults which are, moreover, administered with large quantities of affect and aggression. The child gradually realizes that its power is waning. It has not only to renounce sensual gratifications but must in addition lose its sense of omnipotence. The language of violent affect is rendered useless as a means of communication with the parents, and the child has to renounce them in favor of speech. Tempers and crying spells are met by the parents with increasing stoicism or measures of punishment or suppression. It seems as if these affective outbursts at the age of two to three years are struggling attempts of thechild to maintain the archaic common ground so familiar to it: the intensely pleasurable affective rapport with the parents, and the child's affective domination of them. This attempt is destined, like the Oedipal strivings, to fail from the danger of loss of love and fear of castration.

Direct affective attacks failing, the child searches for other means to regain entrance to the Garden of Eden. This coincides in time with beginning to walk, and the process of taking in impressions of the outside world with all its senses, acquiring knowledge and testing reality. The child utilizes these newly gained discoveries to share them with mother and father and thus restore a common ground with them (D. T. Burlingham). The expressions of enchantment and affection which the parents give so abundantly at the first presentations of such fact-finding bring the child a temporary restoration of the old affective, and a new intellectual, coxperience with the parents. But again the parents cannot allow the child to enter their lives beyond a limited distance. The common emotional and intellectual experiences infringe upon the strenuously established repressions of the adults. The small child's keen powers of observation, it's bold intuition, become unwelcome. This applies especially to perceptions in the sphere of sexual exploration whose failure to reveal the secret of the sexual relationship between the parents marks the beginning of the latency periodwhich is characterized by repression of overt sexual
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interests and a slowing down of development of the child's so far brilliant exploratory intellect. Little emphasis has been put on the fact that the small child twice in its early development, meets a rebuff in its passionate endeavor to share the lives of the parents. It learns gradually to discriminate between those perceptions and experiences which it may share with adults and those facts which are better kept to oneself as secrets. Taking advantage of the discovery that it may collect and maintain a secret treasury of libidinous experiences and knowledge, inaccessible to the adult world, the childlearns to isolate these experiences from verbalization and hide its secret from the depriving adults. The magic of such relative 'stupidity' during the latency period provides for the child a partly undetected, partly tolerated preverbal libidinous channel ofcommunication with the parents without conflict. Besides this inconspicuous, quiet, 'peaceful infiltration' we meet often enough, during latency and beyond it, with innumerable forms of a kind of guerilla warfare on the part of children, well-known from child analyses and child guidance practice. In all these conflict situations between children and parents we are struck again and again by the intuitive accuracy with which children are able to detect the weakest spots in their parents, and how often they succeed in gaining entrance and seducing the parents to respond in the old affective way. When this partly archaic, strongly affective rapport is restored on a preverbal level by child and parents it escapes detection. An important part of this libidinous interchange throughout latency has been described by Lillian Rotter-Kertsz with reference to the child and its father (9). How adult secret is played off against child's secret and vice versa was nicely demonstrated in a child's analysis. Lilly, six and a half years old, was analyzed for extreme motor inhibition and inability to play. At the root of her neurosis was, first, her accurate intuitive knowledge of how much the family regarded her a superfluous burden. Her birth was accidental. The parents were poor people who had difficulties even in
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sharing food with this unwanted child. Second, a congenital dislocation of the coccyx had made it necessary to confine Lilly at the age of two in a hospital far removed from her mother. Not before she had established a very good relationship with me, was Lilly able to talk and reveal her secrets. She was compelled, for example, to turn and look back frantically out of the trolley car window whether coming or going because, 'You never can tell whether your mother would not lead you somewhere from where you would not be able to find your way home'. This recalls the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel, whose parents wanted to get rid of them. They made one night a secret plan to lead the children into the woods and leave them to perish. But the children overhearing the secret of the parents at night pretend ignorance and innocence. The magic of their apparent dumbness enabled them not only to intrude into the parents' secret (primal scene), but to keep their own secret (defense against the parents' secret) which in turn enabled them, when abandoned by the parents in the woods, to return home. The mechanisms which lead to pathological limitation and restriction of intellectual functions of the ego have been examined by many analysts.1 The genesis of intellectual inhibition follows the general pattern described by Freud in Hemmung, Symptom und Angst.2 Erotization of the intellectual functions of the ego has been shown to cause the ego to give up this function in order to escape conflicts (2), (10). It is known also that the intellectual restriction is often used to disguiseaggression in order to escape retaliation (1), (12). Pseudo stupidity, in

addition, has been described as a display of castration to escape fear of literal castration and theloss of a loved object (10), (11).

1 Cf. Landauer (10), Rado (14), Aichhorn, Bornstein (2), Bergler (1), Oberndorf (12), Edith Jacobssohn (8),

Maenchen (11) and others. 2 Freud: The Problem of Anxiety (Eng. trans.). New York: The Psa. Quarterly Press and W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1936.
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This paper aims to demonstrate still another essential function of stupidity: to restore or maintain a secret libidinous rapport within the family. In an unusually impressive fashion the usefulness of stupidity was demonstrated in an eighteen-yearold pseudoimbecilic male, whom I had analyzed for almost three years when the treatment had to be discontinued. He had a whole arsenal of defense mechanisms and symptoms. Besides latent passive homosexuality, he presented definite obsessional neurotic as well as phobic mechanisms which contributed to a severe impoverishment of his ego. Jack was one of nonidentical twins, born as late offsprings of a father who, at the time of their birth, was ailing with a heart condition, and who died when they were nine years old. Up to his death the father, always a cranky introvert and owner of a large estate, maintained in an obsessional fashion a splendid isolation for the twins in this ruralenvironment. He projected his fears of infection and death especially onto Jack, the more delicate of the twins, who because of his resemblance to the father attracted his intense ambivalent love. The father believed the boys should grow like delicate plants in sunshine and air, under the best hygienic conditions, in the country. The vegetative functions of thebody should be attended to, and later education in sports introduced. Systematic intellectual education was unnecessary, at least not worth getting at the slightest expense of clean, healthy, simple and innocent rural life. Schooling would involve going to the citydirty, dusty and dangerous with its noisy traffic and effete sexuality. In the seclusion of the country the twins were protected from sexual knowledge. They were to remain innocent, i.e., stupid and ignorant. The patient at first presented the clinical picture of severe pseudoimbecility. He sat with arms hanging, stood up like an automaton, walked with a shuffling gait and wore a silly smile. He stared into space, and an unshaven face completed his pathetic appearance.
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All day long Jack would loiter around with a more or less absent-minded look and, whenever a task came up from which it would be hard for him to escape, he could fall asleep in almost any posture. Though he was extremely affectionate towards the family, especially his sister, the expressions of his attachment were those of a smallchild with abundant exchange of caresses, kisses and hugs. He consciously refused to be treated according to his age. He did not want to make any decisions but was eager, like an obedient child, to obey all wishes of adults as far as his conspicuously limited abilities permitted. In his social activities he was simply an appendage of his married sister, six years older, or of his twin brother John and his fiance. They permitted him to be present like a pet animal which does no harm by its presence and neither understands nor participates. His magic cap of stupidity hid Jack so well that he was almost forgotten. He was allowed to be present during the preliminaries of the sexual relationship of an older brother and his sweetheart, a married woman. The latter was quite desperate when her attention was called to the signs of devotion which she had unconsciously aroused in Jack, and tolerated 'unrecognized.' He was allowed to come into the bedroom where John and his bride lay in bed, and in a more sublimated fashion he participated in the marriage of his sister and brother-in-law. Analysis revealed that his earliest childhood memories centered around passive exhibitionistic experiences which took place in the bathroom. He remembered his twin urinating in his face when they were both in a baby carriage, and hearing the loud laughter of a couple of spectators. Then he recalled that his brother laughed at him when he was having a truss adjusted for congenital inguinal hernia. Compensation for this phallic failure, centered around the pleasure that particular attention paid to his bowel functions (probably because of his inguinal hernia) gave him. These exhibitionistic performances were his only means of keeping contact with his father and mother. When, however, his great complementary curiosity came to expression, his questions were met with
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stereotyped reproofs: 'You should not ask about that.' 'It is not good for you to wonder about it.' 'You are too young.' Thus restricted, his curiosity resolved itself intovoyeurism. Everywhere that he could he would creep in secretly and spy. He was allowed to be present while his mother was bathing on condition that he kept his back turned to her. Under the influence of an athletic instructor, who was 'especially active and a right wing radical', he became quite courageous in sports. Once he fell and injured his leg. In the bathroom he took a washcloth to stem the bleeding when suddenly his father, quite contrary to his usual behavior, jumped at him, struck him, and scolded him about the danger of infection and contamination. The father then attended to the wound himself. This castration scene came up in the analysis of a cynophobia. 'You never can tell about a dog', he said, 'all of a sudden it can bite you in the leg, or it might run between your legs and you might fall over it.' When after the death of his father they were 'dragged into the city to school', contrary to the wish of the father, the patient developed severe isolation and avoidance mechanisms in unconscious compliance with the requirements of the dead father. With his obsessive neurotic mechanisms he was trying to isolate himself from the temptations and dangers of the 'vicious city'. To keep clean in the dirty sexual atmosphere of the city, he had to avoid touching things. A head cold placed him in a predicament because he could not allow his hands to come in contact with the nasal secretions. Similarly when for 'hygienic reasons' it was necessary to masturbate, he exercised great care in avoiding contact with the ejaculate. He avoided barbers from fear of razors but went nevertheless to be shaved, experiencing a thrill which reminded him of similar feelings he had had when a doctor administered eye drops which smarted. He wandered aimlessly through the streets in a state of chronic anxiety about the traffic. He rationalized this, as he did many of his compulsions, on the grounds of hygiene. He took evening walks which extended long after midnight 'in
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order to sleep better'. With his shuffling gait and absent-minded look, seeking to avoid pedestrians as well as vehicles, he had the compulsion to creep along the edge of the pavement and achieved the exact opposite of his conscious intention. He provoked the pedestrians into colliding with him, shouting at him, or pushing him deliberately or unintentionally into the gutter; off the pavement, he was endangered by the cars and trucks. His father had hinted that something like this happened to young people in the vicious city, and he was thus proving it continually to the analyst and to himself. Very similarly to his attitude with reference to traffic in the street, he missed no opportunity to travel and to put himself to great trouble to find occasions for it, though days before he would be sick from fear of having to use the train and of meeting strange people and would fall asleep while traveling. Here the same mechanism was at work: a compromise between his intense curiositythe urge to create situations in which he could watch strange peopleand his anxiety. It was not accidental that this series of neurotic attitudes and symptoms centered for him around forbidden traffic situations in which his impulse to look on and watch overcame the compulsive and phobic defenses. Being a German, traffic (Verkehr), had, for the patient, also the meaning of intercourse. Analysis gave evidence that this connection led to a hypercathexis of all traffic situations which had been prohibited in both meanings of the term by the dead father. He tried to ward off his voyeurism by absent-mindedness in the street or by closing his senses through falling asleep while traveling, while simultaneously obsessively seeking to gratify his curiosity. To summarize, this patient having had, in the phallic stage, to give up competition with his aggressive twin brother in comparison with whom he considered himself malequipped in the phallic sphere because of a congenital hernia and for other reasons, in consequence he regressed to an anal fixation. The counterpart of his analexhibitionism was an intense sexual curiosity against which he had to maintain strong defenses because of castration threats from his father who had warned
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in effect: 'Don't go to the city to learn about the dirty sinful life there and the dangers of traffic. Remain clean, and innocent.' His stupidity served him from early childhoodboth as a defense against anal and sexual conflicts and as a magic cap of invisibility which enabled him to observe intimate performances of the parents in the bathroom without being noticed. In adolescence he renounced his own sexuality to escape castration but succeeded, by means of the magic of stupidity, quietly to participate in the sexual relationships of his brothers and sister. The mechanism of sexual renunciation was aided by identification and substitution with his twin, an alter ego, through whose phallic achievements the

patient experienced the masculinity which he himself had to renounce to say nothing of the homosexual elements involved. Another case of pseudoimbecility is that of a thirteen-year-old boy whose stupidity was maintained in an unconscious rapport with his mother. Lyn was sent toanalysis because after he had failed four times to be promoted and had been placed in a class for retarded children, the boy was found to have a normal I.Q. His stupidity took the form of chronic forgetting. This was not limited to disagreeable things nor to studies, but included every minute detail of his daily routine at home. Through this mechanism he succeeded in keeping his mother occupied with him as if he were a small child. Lyn was the second child and elder son of a Chinese father and a Swedish mother. The parents lived in constant discord and had been unhappy at the prospect of this second child. Quarrels and gross abuse between the parents seem to have become even more marked when Lyn was about two years old. The mother had the superstitious conviction that this child would become stupid because she had had frequent contacts with a senile old man, a customer in the laundry they maintained during the time of her pregnancy with Lyn. First evidence to her of this anticipation was his development at two years of age of what seems to have been spastic stammering. The
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mother took this as the first sign that her son was 'marked' by the elderly imbecile. While relating this, the mother could hardly contain her amusement about the funny little boy, and seemed delighted to relate that the stuttering little fool became much worse when he saw his father attacking her. Apart from his speech, the child's developmentwas normal except for intermittent bedwetting every night for months at a time until he was eight. About Lyn's early relationship to his father little is known except that the father liked to play with the boy and frequently took him for walks. Between the ages of three and four the boy greatly admired his father's toolbox, and was happiest when he could play with it. As the father's job kept him away from home most of the time, themother's influence was overwhelming. Lyn's strong attachment to his mother was strengthened by rivalry with a brother born when he was five. A short time later themother had to be hospitalized because 'her blood was poisoned by my father' (gonorrhoea). Shortly after her return from the hospital she attempted to commit suicidebecause her husband had taken to bringing his girl friends to the house. It was at this time that Lyn began to wet the bed every night. Following her attempt at suicide, and as a final weapon in her effort to win her husband back, the mother left home. With much resistance Lyn recalled in analysis memories of this period. While pretending to be asleep, Lyn overheard many dramatic sexual scenes between the fatherand his woman friend. Fearful of being censured by his severe and stolid mother for hearing and seeing things which he felt he should not have seen and heard, the boy attempted to forget what he had witnessed. During the weeks of her absence the mother kept thinking that the child 'must be seeing a lot of dirty sexual things'. Troubled by this thought, she decided to return to her children and ask her husband to move out. Subsequently, when Lyn was about eight years old, the father deserted permanently. In analysis the patient revealed intense sadistic fantasies
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about his sister which were obviously displacements from his mother. In the transference, he displayed the same excessively devoted, submissive and passive attitudes that he exhibited towards his mother, the reverse of his sadistic fantasies. Each time he divulged one of these fantasies, he reacted with an increased display of forgetfulness and apparent stupidity. In this case, severe restriction of the ego utilized the device of forgetting which had as its purpose a resolution of his fears originating in primal scenes which were linked with sadistic scenes, quarrels, contamination, 'blood poisoning' and represented to him his father, sexuality and the attitude of his mother towards both. After the father left, the boy resorted to the magic of stupidity to meet the demands of his mother. He had to forget his real fatherthe underprivileged, socially inferior Chinaman, the deserter, sexual and unclean and to create instead an illusory fatherstately, kinglike, nordicin terms of his mother's characteristics. This identification with a phallic mother simultaneously assigned to Lyn the rle of the castrated, servant father which meant that in the identification with the father he was subject to castration and rejection by his mother. To avoid castration, he had to forget all about sex and maintain an appearance of innocence by forgetting all the experiences in connection with his father. The mother's hatred of this child from the time of her pregnancy with him found expression in her superstitious conviction that he would be born stupid. Hatred of thefather was partly displaced to this child in attitudes of castrative depreciation from which, however, unlike his father, he was able

neither to escape nor defend himself effectively. Deserted by her husband for another woman after having infected her with gonorrhoea, the mother took lasting revenge for the insult in keeping this substitute for the hated husband, chained to herself as a castrated, innocent fool whom she might never lose to another woman. Through the magic of his stupidity it was possible for the boy and his mother, to maintain a close relationship on a preverbal level, very similar to that of a small child and its mother. But to be stupid alone
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did not suffice; the sexual experiences of the father and his girl which the boy had observed had been too conspicuously verbalized and constantly refreshed by the grudging mother to permit the appearance of sexual innocence. A more active defense mechanism of undoing, by forgetting, had to be established by the ego to efface the contradiction between the mother's denying attitude and the grossly overt sexual behavior of the father which through verbalization had been brought to consciousacknowledgement between mother and son. Another case, a girl, was brought for analysis at the age of nine. She was the youngest among four siblings. Her mother had been left a widow when the patient was two and a half years old and the mother bestowed all her love upon the baby daughter. They shared a double bed from then on, and at the age of nine, when the school intimated that the mother ought to give Betsy other sleeping accomodations, she protested: 'But how can I live without my baby daughter beside me?'. The intense libidinous nature of this mother-child relationship was demonstrated by the fact that I usually found them in the waiting room, Betsy on her mother's lap, in close embrace. For the mother the strong sexual attachment to the baby daughter was a definite substitute for her marital relationship with the husband. Through continual seduction thechild did not succeed in the normal and necessary repression of sexuality of the latency period. The abnormal sexual stimulation led to excessive masturbation which met with violent disapproval from the mother without any insight about her part in bringing it about. At the age of seven the child was seduced and sexually exploited by a fifteen-year-old brother following which she developed symptoms resembling psychosis. The school physician and her teachers pronounced her the strangest and most stupid pupil they had ever observed. Her I.Q. was 116. They were eager to have the childanalyzed although they really believed that the child was psychotic or feebleminded. In the anamnesis she was described as having spells of complete
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withdrawal, 'remote staring' with expressionless eyes reminiscent of petit mal; or as 'sitting in a daze' seemingly without awareness 'staring with a cow-like gaze at the others'. Analysis revealed that the sexual relationship between Betsy and her brother, who bore his father's name, was a form of prostitution in which she was exhibited for money to a classmate of the brother, and included mutual masturbation and attempts at anal intercourse. To the analyst the child confided a passionate longing to catch areal bird. The bird proved to be the representation of the spirit of her father whose death she imagined as a mysterious flying away of his soul like a great bird. In Betsy's mind only an eagle was a real bird; canaries, sparrows, and other small birds were not real birds. One of her earliest memories, was her father's fondness for breeding pigeons to which her mother objected as a nuisance, soiling the car and the house. From associations and drawings it became clear that the bird had the further special meaning of father's penis which mother disliked, feared, and wanted to destroy. In a phase of her analysis, in which she complained repeatedly that she would never catch a 'real bird' herself, she contemptuously gave her mother, as a gift, a feeding board for birds. This gift was conspicuous for its awkward, misshapen and impracticalconstructionas if to say that mother would never acquire a real bird either. She divulged her opinion that she would never get a penis because her mother had none to give her. Perhaps her mother was responsible for her father's death as well as for the loss of the real bird which father could have given to her; hence a preoccupation for months with bird collections, investigations of the habits and biology of birds, measurements of their beaks, tails, etc. This was analyzed as an escape from the penislessmother and a desire to appropriate the brother's penis as defenses against fears of self-injury (castration) from masturbation. The incestuous relationship with the brother relieved the grave preoedipal fixation to the mother and was also an escape from masturbation which seemed to Betsy much more dangerous than any other sin. By pinning the guilt onto her
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mother, she lessened her own sense of guilt about having lost her penis through masturbation. She shifted onto her seducers, mother and brother, as adults much of the responsibility and guilt, and vacillated between overt incest with the brother and innocent, preverbal sexual communion with the mother. After analysis had brought to light the above facts, the mother wrote me a letter confessing her knowledge of the sexual activities between Betsy and her eldest son. She asked me to talk with her grown-up daughter, obviously the representative of her conscience. She asked me in the letter to regard Betsy as the 'innocent offender' rather than put too much blame upon the son. It is apparent that she was trying to excuse her own early seduction of the baby daughter as if to say that the daughter in her innocent foolishness had crept into her bed, seducing her and not the other way round. It was astonishing that she had tolerated the sexual relation between the brother and sister for years after detection. The mother's own incestuous drives towards her eldest son prevented her from safeguarding the child who, protected by her 'innocence' and stupidity, was permitted an incestuous relationship with the brother in which the mother participated vicariously with little apparent sense of guilt. This case furnishes an especially striking example of how stupidity as a device enabled both a mother and child to maintain a secret libidinous interchange on an exclusively affective level.

SUMMARY
Pseudostupidity enables children as well as infantile adults to participate to an amazingly unlimited extent in the sexual life of parents and other adults. In my cases the manoeuvre of the children was emotionally fully reciprocated by a parent or sibling because it met the adult's own unconscious desire, isolated from his feelings of guilt. This utilization of stupidity is widespread because mutual sexual desires are gratified on a preverbal affective level, without
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becoming conscious through word pictures, which renders repression or other defense measures unnecessary. Thus children and parents are able to maintain a distorted but gratifying affective communion which would otherwise be limited to mother and infant.

REFERENCES
BERGLER, EDMUND Zur Problematik der Pseudodebilitt Int. Ztschr. f. Psa. XVIII 1932 No. 4 BORNSTEIN, BERTA Zur Psychogenese der Pseudodebilitt Int. Ztschr. f. Psa. XVI 1930 Nos. 3/4 BURLINGHAM, DOROTHY TIFFANY Mitteilungsdrang und Gestndniszwang Imago XX 1934 No. 2 BURLINGHAM, DOROTHY TIFFANY Die Einfhlung des Kleinkindes in die Mutter Imago XXI 1935 No. 4 BURLINGHAM, DOROTHY TIFFANY Kinderanalyse und Mutter Ztschr. f. Psa. Pdagogik VI 1932 FREUD Hemmung, Symptom und Angst. Ges. Schr. XI Eng. trans.:The Problem of Anxiety New York: The Psychoanal. Q. Press and W. W. Norton & Co., 1936 [] GROSS, ALFRED Zur Psychologie des Geheimnisses Imago XXII 1936 No. 2 JACOBSSOHN, EDITH Lernstrungen beim Kinde durch masochistische Mechanismen Int. Ztschr. f. Psa. XVIII 1932 No. 2 ROTTER-KERTSZ, LILLIAN Der tiefenpsychologische Hintergrund der Inzestusen Fixierung Int. Ztschr. f. Psa. XXII 1936 No. 3 LANDAUER, KARL Zur Psychosexuellen Genese der Dummheit Ztschr. f. Sexualwissenschaft u. Sexualpolitik XVI 1929 MAENCHEN, ANNA Denkhemmung und Aggression Ztschr. f. Psa. Pdagogik X 1936 pp. 276-299 OBERNDORF, C. P. The Feeling of Stupidity Int. J. Psychoanal. XX 1939 Nos. 3/4 [] RIBBLE, MARGARET Disorganizing Factors in the Personality of the Infant Amer J. Psychiat. XCVIII 1941 No. 3 RADO, SANDOR ber eine besondere usserungsform der Kastrationsangst Int. Ztschr. f. Psa. V 1919 p. 206
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Article Citation [Who Cited This?]

Mahler-Schoenberger, M. (1942). Pseudoimbecility: A Magic Cap of Invisibility. Psychoanal. Q., 11:149-164